Verbal Java: Meaning-Based Language Can Be Instantly Translated

Indian software developer Ajit Narayanan shows off his Free Speech engine at the TED conference Thursday. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED/Flickr

LONG BEACH, California — Software written in the Java programming language can be written once and then run on all sorts of computers without being recompiled. An emerging system for human communication, Free Speech, performs a similar trick: Encode information once in Free Speech and it could be instantly rendered into any language.

Using Free Speech, a news publisher could disseminate articles capable of adapting themselves to the native tongue of whomever is reading them; since Free Speech records meaning rather than words, it can easily be converted into idiomatic speech or writing in any number of human languages.

At the moment, Free Speech is mainly to teach English in India, whose citizens famously speak a wide array of regional languages, and to help teach speech to children with autism and other disabilities. But its creator, Ajit Narayanan, sees big possibilities, which he described at the TED conference here Thursday.

Narayanan hit upon the idea for Free Speech while developing techniques, including an iPad app “Avaz,” to teach verbal skills to autistic children. There were established techniques for teaching vocabulary, like pairing words with pictures, but grammar presented a major stumbling block.

“Grammar is incredibly powerful,” Narayanan told the TED audience. “It is one component of language that takes finite vocabulary and allows an infinite amount of ideas to be conveyed.”

But finding ways to abandon grammar has its benefits as well. After watching the mother of an autistic child convert the ambiguous exclamation “Eat” into a meaningful sentence via questions – “Eat what? Eat when? Who eats?” – he upgraded Avaz with its own question and answer system, as well as with filters for tense and other bits of information conveyed with grammar. The result was Free Speech, an engine that produces a sort of intermediate data structure between thought and words. Narayanan says the meaning-based system, and the interface to it provided by Avaz, has proven a faster way for many autistic children to communicate than any spoken language.

It remains to be seen whether there is general utility in a grammar-free linguistic engine like Free Speech. Narayanan’s Invention Labs will, presumably, be investigating that issue further. But for many children in India, letting go of grammar has, counterintuitively, been a great way to come back around and fully comprehend grammar, along with the rest of an unknown language.

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